Kathy Velikov

Kathy Velikov is a registered Architect, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the current president of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture). She is founding partner of the research-based practice RVTR, which serves as a platform for exploration and experimentation in the agency of architecture and urban design within the context of dynamic ecological systems, infrastructures, materially and technologically mediated environments, and emerging social organizations. The work ranges in scale from regional territories and urbanities to full-scale installation-based prototypes that explore responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere, and interaction. Kathy is a recipient of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Award, the Canadian Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, and the Oberdick Fellowship at Taubman College.

Her practice, RVTR, has won numerous awards and their work has been exhibited widely; recently, “Infundibuliforms” received a 2016 R+D Awards honorable mention from Architect Magazine and EXTRACTION, the Canadian Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale received a 2017 CSLA Award of Excellence. She is co-author of Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (2015) and her work and writing has been published in JAE, IJAC, Leonardo, New Geographies, eVolo, Volume, [bracket] Goes Soft, and MONU, as well as in Franca Trubiano’s High Performance Homes, Rashida Ng and Sneha Patel’s Performative Materials in Architecture, David Gerber and Mariana Ibanez’s Paradigms in Computing, Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer’s Hypernatural, and Infrastructure Space, edited by Ilka and Andreas Ruby. Kathy is currently working on an exhibition, symposium, and publication titled “Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural.”

She has held previous teaching appointments at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. At Taubman College, Kathy teaches courses in the Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies, as well as Graduate Architecture ecology and technology seminars, studios, and thesis.